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Croatians see in their past in flow of migrants

By Riley SparksSpecial to the Star

Tues., Oct. 6, 2015

OPATOVAC, CROATIA — On a misty night in Opatovac, Eastern Croatia, a young cop watched a tired mother and father shepherd their kids off a bus packed with refugees, and looked into a two-decade-old reflection: his family, his wife’s family, his friends.

Vladko, who would give only his first name, was just 3 when the Serbo-Croatian war started. Memories of that time are blurry, the 27-year-old Croatian police officer said.

A Croatian police officer, Vladko, watches as a Syrian man helps his wife and children off of a packed bus carrying refugees to a transit camp in Opatovac. (Riley Sparks photo)

But he remembers the fear.

“I was in school, and we had to go into the basement. I remember the sound of the sirens,” he said.

His wife, also a child at the time, had to flee Sarajevo with her family.

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“She remembers pieces. They had to run through the fields. They hid in caves. She remembers the bugs,” he said. “My wife, she was like these people.”

Roughly100,000 refugees have arrived in Croatia since mid-September, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). One day last week alone, 4,344 people crossed into the country from Serbia.

Many of the mostly young men arriving in Opatovac wore UNHCR-issued plastic bags on their feet, souvenirs from the crossing at Bapska, a rain-soaked mud bath for much of the week.

From Bapska, buses take refugees to Opatovac, where they're given transit papers and moved onto westbound trains in Tovarnik.

On both sides of the border, this is a place that knows about war.

At railway crossings in this part of Eastern Croatia, trains carrying refugees to the Hungarian border pass two types of houses: new plaster homes rebuilt at the end of the fighting, and older ones, never repaired: bricks shot through with bullets, scorched by fire.

Thousands fled during fighting here between 1991 and 1995. In many villages, almost every home was destroyed.

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In the regional capital Vukovar, where a ruined water tower — gnarled rebar and blackened concrete blasted by artillery — looms over the road into town, Milka Dikomir described coming home after 10 years as a refugee in Australia, only to find her home and village in ruins.

It was here in 1991 that Serb forces lined up and shot at least 260 prisoners of war.

“It was very, very bad here,” Dikomir said.

The Croatian prime minister has blamed Serbia for sending refugees to Croatia instead of straight on to Hungary, even though Hungary closed that border in mid-September.

Crossings out of Croatia have opened and closed unpredictably, depending on the day and the mood of the Croatian, Serbian and Hungarian governments.

“The past two or three days it's been difficult, because sometimes it's one border, sometimes it's the other, or a third,” said Nathalie Salles, who was working with Médecins Sans Frontières in Opatovac.

After refugees enter the country, the route shuttling them to the Hungarian border is now running smoothly, said Rafal Kostrzynski, the UNHCR's spokesperson in Croatia.

“It has been improving. Two, three weeks ago, it was a terrible mess here,” Kostrzynski said.

But no one at the border can say how long the road will stay open.

Refugees began passing through Croatia in large numbers after Hungary walled off its border with Serbia with a three-metre-tall razor wire fence. Hungarian workers now appear to be preparing fences to close the crossing from Croatia at Zakany, one of the busiest in the country.

Hungary could shut down or impose controls any day, as Germany and Denmark did, each for a few days last month.

The EU has warned Hungary that it cannot fence off its border with Slovenia. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said recently that the wall wouldn't be permanent. But Orban, who in September told Muslim refugees “Please do not come,” seems unlikely to substantially soften his position.

Some refugees waiting for buses in Belgrade recently talked about travelling through Slovenia and avoiding Hungary entirely.

Refugees who had just arrived at the city's central bus station said they were getting on buses to Croatia as quickly as they could, fearing that the shifting borders could throw another block in the long, dangerous road they had taken.

Many of those waiting had already been bounced between closed borders on their way to the Balkans, and seemed sure that they would make it to Western Europe somehow, no matter what happens further up the road.

Habib Maydan, 26, from Afghanistan's Wardak province, said he trekked for almost a month from Afghanistan to Iran before crossing into Turkey.

Maydan said he drove fuel supply trucks for NATO forces in Afghanistan and had been shot in both legs in one of many Taliban attacks on his convoy.

Iranian border guards shot at the refugees as they crossed, he said, hitting at least two people. He didn't make it through that time, or the next, he said. But he kept trying. “The third time, I ran very fast.”

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